Asking a Question or Giving an Answer?

I was looking back over some of the reflective writing I did for my MA and came across a post I wrote titled 'Uncertainty' which reflected on one a group session during which we'd explored the work of William Kentridge. Speaking about his animated drawings he'd commented that part of the joy of his process is making fragments, that they show the process of thinking. He describes this as a means of making sense of the world. The making is a process of discovery. This chimed with me very deeply at the time and in re-reading it I notice still does.

I was also fascinated by his statement that there is a "desperation in all certainty". He described how when you are certain your voice gets louder and you become more authoritarian; to the point where you will bring an army to stand beside you, you are so certain. He was musing over the alternative power in uncertainty.

I am not an artist who starts a project knowing how it will turn out. For me the joy in my work is the exploring, the uncertainty, the experimentation. There are printmakers who design a print on a computer, plan all the colour separations and then produce what they have designed, how much alteration happens along the way I am sure is unique to each person but this approach is far too structured for me. I have to feel my way along throughout each print, not quite knowing what I'm grasping for, not quite knowing what I'm going to get. The answers are in the process.

In the MA session, while we mused over the idea of uncertainty one of my cohort asked what I thought was rather a profound question: is your work asking a question or giving an answer? I couldn't answer for myself.

Since writing that original post a lot has happened, both personally and artistically: The children have got bigger (we're rapidly approaching the teenage years), we've moved house, I now have a dedicated studio, we live next door to my parents. All this means life at home is vaguely settled but as the children need slightly less hands on care the parents will need slightly more. The new house is much bigger but much crumblier, work needs doing. I have realised there will always be distractions, big and small. I need to embrace these and realise that having a studio at home is both a blessing and a curse; find a way to maximise the blessings! There's constant uncertainty in life.

Artistically I've moved into large installations, I've embraced yet more techniques and in so doing both of these seem to be embracing more and more uncertainty. But I've also begun teaching linocut workshops, there's a confidence in ability and understanding needed here which feels more like certainty. I find this comforting. My subject matter is firmly rooted in the natural world and our experience of it but the more I read the more I realise I'm simply doing what scores of creatives have done before me; I'm trying to make sense of the world and my place in it through art, so am I asking questions or am I trying to provide answers?

I'm horrified by what our species has done to all the other species we share the planet with over millennia, and yet I can't help but marvel at our ingenuity. Last month it was reported that Indonesian cave paintings are rewriting the understanding of our creativity. We are an innately creative species, something so unique and so amazing, and yet so commonplace for us that we forget to notice.

Tracey Emin's huge show at the Tate has just opened to rave reviews and although I haven't seen it yet from what I've read it's an intensely personal reaction to the world Emin finds herself negotiating over the decades, when whittled right down she uses art to make sense of the world and her place in it. So is she asking a question or providing an answer?

Maybe both are possible at once. Maybe you can state your point of view whilst asking for anothers opinion at the same time? I produce landscape images inspired by real places but I don't directly copy, I take all the bits I want and edit out the parts don't want. I move trees and ignore power lines. Is this me stating that the answer is to embrace the natural world, am I saying that humans should shape it or am I asking a question about the human built environment and the harm we do? I'm still not sure but I'm going to lean into that uncertainty and make some more prints, maybe one day I'll find the answer...